About Radio Free Paragon

“It is a way now, approximately, of being home. The forum has
become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar
cafe that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones.”
-William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, 2003

Once upon a time, there was this game. It launched in 2004, and quickly became something of a phenomenon. It was a Massively Multi-Player Online Role-playing Game called City of Heroes. Within a year, it had blossomed into a community unlike any other MMORPG on the market, a distinction it still holds today.

The CoH community were heroes, even if just in a virtual world, and they behaved like heroes. On any other MMO, a new player coming on and asking for help or advice in a public channel would be subjected to insults, ridicule, and profanity. But not in CoH! There, people fell over themselves offering to help the newcomer and welcome them into the community.

For this reason, City of Heroes became a home away from home for so many people... a place the players could come to enjoy a game with friends - some of whom were made through the game - online, a place for role-playing the superhero (and later, supervillain) life, a place to vent, to grieve, to celebrate, to seek advice, or just to hang out. But it was home. And then... it was gone.

The company-that-shall-not-be-named, who ran City of Heroes, decided to shutter it, something the people running the game only found out about an hour before the playerbase did. Then, just a couple months later, the servers were turned off, and Paragon City, the Rogue Isles, and Praetoria, disappeared.

But the story has a happy ending (at least, for now). In 2019, the server code and server binaries were released publicly, and private servers started popping up all over the world. There's even a group running what's being called a "public server" (i.e. anyone can play on it) that currently has several different "shards" (each its own version of City of Heroes) to choose from. For more information about getting involved, click on "How to Join" at the top fo the screen!

Like Atlantis, rising from the ocean, City of Heroes has returned. And once again, thousands of people around the world get to go home. Finally.